“I should think so,” Joanna said. “Wouldn’t you be?”
“Yes,” George Winfield admitted. “I’m afraid I would.”
Joanna turned on her heel and started away. Then she stopped and turned back. “There are times when that wife of yours is a meddlesome—” She bit off the rest of the sentence.
George Winfield sighed. “I know,” he said. “Believe me, I know.”
Coming out of George Winfield’s office, Joanna sat in her Civvie for a moment, calming herself and catching her breath. The anger she felt toward her interfering mother left her drained and shaken. She wanted to grab her telephone, call Eleanor up, and rail at her for not minding her own business, but yelling at her mother wouldn’t change a thing. Farther up the canyon, emergency lights still flashed and pulsed off the steep hillsides. Somehow, seeing those lights and knowing that the Haz-Mat team was still at work and probably would be for hours propelled her out of her anger-induced paralysis. It was time to focus on a course of action.
There was no question about what had to be done. Not only had Jenny found a body, she had also been traumatized by seeing one of her friends—someone who had done no wrong—taken into what must have seemed like police custody. Joanna had to go to Jenny, the sooner the better. If the choice was between comforting her daughter and attending a wedding with Butch, there was no contest.
But what about Maggie MacFerson? Joanna was the person who had brought Maggie to town, and it was her responsibility to take the woman—drunk or sober—back to Phoenix. The thought of Maggie wandering through a strange town on her own was enough to make Joanna start the engine and put the Crown Victoria in gear.
She caught sight of Maggie several blocks away, trudging determinedly downhill. The white bandages on her hands caught in the beams of passing headlights and glowed like moving, iridescent balloons. Joanna pulled up beside the walking woman and rolled down her window. “Where are you headed?” she asked.
Maggie MacFerson stopped walking and turned to glare at Joanna through the open window. “I didn’t see any watering holes as we came into town. I figure if I go downhill far enough, I’m bound to run into something.”
“Get in,” Joanna urged. “I’ll give you a lift.”
“No lectures?”
“No lectures.”
Joanna got out, went around the car, and let Maggie in. Then she fastened her seat belt.
“Thanks,” Maggie said grudgingly. “That was a bitch!”
Joanna knew Maggie didn’t mean getting in and out of the car. She was talking about the ordeal of identifying a murdered loved one. “Yes,” Joanna said. “I know”
“Do you?” Maggie asked sharply.
Joanna nodded. “You interviewed me when I was elected, after my first husband was shot and killed, remember?”
“Oh, that’s right,” Maggie said as the anger drained from her voice. “I forgot. Sorry.” She fell silent then as Joanna struggled to ignore her own rampaging emotions while she drove the narrow winding thoroughfare called Tombstone Canyon. That one exchange had been enough to catapult Joanna back into the unimaginable pain she had lived with immediately after Andy’s murder. She knew too well how much that kind of violent death hurt and the kind of impact it had on the people left behind. Andy’s murder was now three years in the past, but Joanna doubted the pain of it would ever go away entirely.
Maggie ducked her head to look up at the glowing lights from houses perched on the steep hillsides on either side of the street. “The people who live in those places must be half mountain goat,” she said.
Grateful for Maggie’s attempt to defuse the stricken silence, Joanna responded in kind. “If I were you,” she said, “I wouldn’t bother challenging any of them to a stair-climbing contest.”
Coming into the downtown area, Joanna drove straight to the Copper Queen Hotel and pulled up into the loading zone out front. Once again, she went around the car and opened both the door and the seat belt to let Maggie out.
“The bar’s right over there,” Joanna said, nodding her head toward the outside entrance to the hotel’s lounge. “Why don’t you go on inside. I need to check on something.”
While Maggie headed toward the bar, Joanna hurried to the desk. “Do you have any vacancies tonight?” she asked the young woman behind the counter.
“We sure do. What kind of a room?”
“Single. Nonsmoking.”
“For just one night?”
Joanna nodded. The clerk pushed a registration form across the counter. Joanna filled it out with Maggie’s name, and paid for the room with her own credit card. Once she had the key her hand she went into the bar, where Maggie was sitting in front of a glass filled with amber liquid. Out of deference to her bandaged hands, the bartender had put a long straw in the cocktail glass.
“Something’s happened at home,” Joanna said, settling on the stool next to Maggie. “I’m going to have to spend some time with my daughter. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve booked a room lilt you here at the Copper Queen, courtesy of the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department. Here’s the key. Tomorrow morning, First thing, I’ll take you back to Phoenix. I hope that’s all right.”
“Can’t you put me on a bus?”
“There isn’t a bus.”
“A taxi, then?”
“There isn’t one that’ll take you as far as Phoenix.”
“Well, then, I guess it’ll have to be all right, won’t it?” Maggie replied after slurping a long swallow through the straw. “Was it something I said, or are you just opposed to riding around with drunks in your car?”
Joanna ignored the gibe. “Here’s my hone phone number,” she added. Next to the key on the counter, Joanna placed a business card on which she had scribbled her number at High Lonesome Ranch. Maggie peered at the card but made no effort to collect it or the key. When Maggie said nothing more, Joanna left the lounge, stopping back by the front desk on her way out.
“Maggie MacFerson, the guest in room nineteen, is in the bar,” she told the desk clerk. “You’ll recognize her right away. She’s got bandages on both hands and probably won’t be able to manage a key. It’s probably not going to take much Scotch to put her back under, either. Would you please be sure she makes it to her room safely?”
“Sure thing, Sheriff Brady,” the desk clerk said. “I’ll be glad to. Does she need help with her luggage?”
Joanna didn’t recognize the young woman, but by now she was accustomed to the idea that there were lots of people in Cochise County who knew the sheriff by sight—or maybe by credit card—when she had no idea who they were. “She doesn’t have any luggage,” Joanna returned. “But thanks. I appreciate it.”
As Joanna climbed into the Civvie, her cell phone began to ring. She could see her caller was Chief Deputy Montoya. “Hello, Frank,” she said.
Unfortunately Old Bisbee existed in a cleft in the Mule Mountains into which no cell phone signal could penetrate. The only sounds emanating from Joanna’s receiver were unintelligible sputterings. Hanging up in frustration, she reached for the radio.
“Tica,” she said to Dispatch. “Can you patch me through to Chief Deputy Montoya? He tried to call me on the cell phone a minute ago, but I’m up in Old Bisbee in a dead zone.”
Putting the Civvie in gear, she began negotiating the series of one-way streets that would take her back down to Main Street. After several long minutes, Frank’s voice cane through the radio.
“Where are you?” he demanded. “I could hear your voice, but you kept breaking up.”
“I’m just now leaving Old Bisbee,” she told limn. “I’m on my way out to the ranch.”
“How did the ID go?”
“About how you’d expect. I just dropped the victim’s sister off at the Copper Queen Hotel for a medicinal Scotch to calm her nerves. I also rented her a room. I’ve got to go home to see Jenny. I told Maggie MacFerson that I’ll drive her back to Phoenix in the morning. The idea that there aren’t hourly Greyhounds running through Bisbee overnight was news to her.”